About Us
{C} Mahsa Monfared Dear community members, Thank you for helping us grow our community. I know it can be difficult to find your place in a new place, especially if you feel that you cannot communicate your true thoughts with others. Even though I grew up in Canada, I always felt as though I was struggling to speak to people. My first language is Farsi, the language of my home country Iran. My parents always spoke to me in this language and to this day, they still do. Farsi was my first language but I never felt that it belonged to me. Since I never actually lived in Iran for more than a year of my life, Farsi was a language that I was borrowing from my parents. When I began to learn and use English, once again I felt like I was speaking using a borrowed language. I leaned English when I was seven years old, it took me a while to become fluent in it. Even though I think and speak in English today, I always look at it as the language I learned to communicate in, not the language I was born to communicate in. When I speak to my parents now I speak to them using my own language, I call it Farglish (a hybrid of Farsi and English). A typical conversation goes like this: Mom: Hi Mahsa, kojah boodi emrooz? Mahsa: I went to the mall, behet goftam miram to Bay! Mom: chi kharidi? Mahsa: yeh kafsheh Converse, kardand twenty percent off. I sometimes make up my own words which my mom has started to make sense of. I love using Farglish to express my thoughts. At first people made me think that by using Farglish it meant that I spoke poor Farsi and poor English. People may think that I am a poor language user but I like to think that I have a unique skill which they don’t have. I am able to be two people at the same time. I can have two perspective at the same time. Being a multilingual has given me the gift of creating my own communication tool. As a language teacher, I love watching my students experiment and explore with language. Some of the best conversations we’ve had in class are when students have used a hybrid of their language and English to contribute to a class discussion. I watch my students help each other piece together sentences and their meanings. Would it be easier if we all spoke the same language? Of course! But where is the fun in that? 'Connie Lam James ' A question that I always get when I meet new people is, “Do you speak Chinese?” This is a hard question for me to answer. I have a mix of answers. Yes, I speak a little Cantonese, but not much. My family is actually originally Teochew-speaking but I can only understand a little bit of Cantonese because that was the more popular dialect of Chinese everywhere we lived. We don’t use Teochew much anymore. I am, however, fluent in Vietnamese. My family are known as “The Boat People.” They are originally from Vietnam, arriving in Canada as refugees. However, we identify as ethnic Chinese with our ancestors hailing from the Canton province in China. When we came to Canada, my family settled in Vietnamese communities, first in Alberta and then in B.C. So I grew up hearing mostly Vietnamese. Later, I get asked why I don’t read or write in Vietnamese. Well, this is hard to answer as well. I am illiterate in Vietnamese. People find this hard to understand since Vietnamese is written in the same alphabet as English. But I find the spoken and written word to be as different as night and day unless I am given a specific context to read in. Give me a Vietnamese menu, for instance, and my eyes will skip over the English translations and skim only the Vietnamese words. And I can tell you which nuoc cham goes best with cuon goi. With all this confusion, lots of people then decide that I only really speak English. At home, with my family, none of this really matters. We just speak. For example, my conversations with my grandma contain a mesh of everything – Teochew, Cantonese, Vietnamese, English, Whatever. Most people would meet my grandma and simply say that she is not an English-speaker. I disagree. After years in Canada, my grandma has forgotten the Cantonese or Vietnamese word for “seat belt.” She will turn to me in my car after settling into her seat and ask, “Con giup Popo cai seatbelt lai, duoc khong?” She will see a shirt she admires and it will be called, “cute, cute.” So maybe other people expect me to define what language I speak. But I’d like to think about what language is when I am with my family. To my grandma, I am her granddaughter, her chao ngoai. When I am annoying, I am very mafan. And she will always be my Popo. I hear the English, the Vietnamese and the Cantonese all intertwined and I hear home. This is my experience with language. I would love to hear your experience too so post away! *I had to confirm the spelling of the Vietnamese words written above with family members.